Pragmatic focuses on the meaning potential of an utterance – not just what is said, but how it is said and in what context. It is a philosophical domain that examines speakers’ communicative intentions, the particular circumstances of their utterance and how their actions (or their failure to act) reveal their understanding of their own linguistic situations.
For management researchers, pragmatism offers the opportunity to navigate the research process with an appreciation for and engagement with respondents’ experiences, beliefs, knowledge and action. This provides space to explore complexities that emerge from the research process and the interconnectivity of these within respondent organisations. This can be a valuable way to navigate research in complex settings such as those of NGOs, where organizational processes are often poorly documented and rely heavily on the knowledge and interpretations of implementers.
Using a pragmatic approach allows management researchers to focus on generating useful, practical and actionable knowledge that is anchored in the research respondent’s experience. This can have a significant impact on the organizations involved in the study and can help to drive organisational change. In the two example projects described in this article, selecting pragmatism as an overarching philosophical orientation was closely intertwined with establishing research objectives and framing the research problem at the design stage. The decision to apply a pragmatic approach was also influenced by a desire to uncover staff interests and perceived benefits of the research at an early stage in order to guide the subsequent design and implementation phases of the project.
In addition, the pragmatist philosophy of inquiry offers the potential to be used as an alternative to more traditional approaches to qualitative research in which a researcher adopts a neutral position towards the participants and their experiences and thoughts, in favour of a more collaborative approach. This can be a particularly important feature for studies with vulnerable groups such as those in the social sector.
Pragmatism is a broad philosophical movement with significant influence across a range of fields, including sociology, psychology and philosophy. It is perhaps most closely associated with Dewey who developed the pragmatist philosophy of inquiry, arguing that all conscious human activities involve some degree of interpretative process and that humans do not separate their knowledge and beliefs from their actions.
The development of the field of pragmatics, a subset of linguistics, is one of the most significant contributions that has come from classical pragmatism. The term ‘pragmatics’ is now commonly used to refer to the study of the interaction between speech acts and their context.
As the health sciences community becomes more aware of pragmatism and its relevance to clinical practice, the number of randomised controlled trials that include the words ‘pragmatic’ or ‘naturalistic’ in the title or abstract is increasing. This may reflect the fact that health care professionals are increasingly concerned about whether the findings of trials they participate in will have any practical application, and that these trials will therefore produce results that are’real world’.